2D Animated Circles

I’ve been asked a cou­ple of times how I made the 2D cir­cles in Kyary ani­ma­tion. The dis­a­pear­ing cir­cles are pret­ty com­mon in motion and ani­ma­tions, and they’re sur­pris­ing­ly easy to do in Blender.

1. Add a bezi­er cir­cle (Add > Curves). Rotate it so it faces the camera.
2. Open the curve prop­er­ties and set the curve type to 2D. Also set the Fill to Both.
3. Go into edit mode. Select all nodes by press­ing “a” and dupli­cate them (shift+d).
4. Make a new shape key, this will be our end state.
5. Make anoth­er shape key, scale the inner cir­cle to 0.

1. Rename “Basis” to “End” and “Key 1” to “Start” so you know which is which.
2. We’ll ani­mate the shape keys first, go to frame 0 and add a key in the slid­er val­ue of the Start shape key (press i while your cur­sor is over the slider).
3. Now go to frame 25 (or so), move the slid­er all the way to 0 and add anoth­er keyframe.

1. Let’s ani­mate the scale of the whole thing for the final effect. On Frame 25 add a keyframe for scal­ing (press i in the 3D view).
2. Move to frame 0 and resize the cir­cle to 0. Add anoth­er key for scaling.

Remember you want to have some time off­set between the growth of the inner and the out­er cir­cles, so it’s not so mechan­i­cal. Also try play­ing with the inter­po­la­tion in the graph edi­tor for more vari­a­tions. Have fun!